(January 23, 2022 at 4:02 am)Belacqua Wrote:(January 23, 2022 at 1:34 am)GrandizerII Wrote: See this article in which third-person views of consciousness are contrasted with first-person.
Chalmers' article is really useful.
I've been through the "hard problem" discussion two or three times on the Internet, back when I was more patient and less grumpy. So every position and every argument that Chalmers cites in the article is something I recognize. It's lovely to see things laid out so plainly, after I struggled to get through it with much less clarity.
I'm also impressed by how well you and @emjay have done on this thread. It reminds me what it's like to be patient and non-grumpy.
It makes sense to keep the zombie problem simple, since it's necessary to address those who deny first-person experience, or its difference from the third person. I'd say what interests me more, however (at the risk of taking things off topic) is the richness of the first person experience, which goes beyond what the zombie issue addresses.
So for example when we talk about first person experience, we say "the experience of seeing red." But whenever we actually have that experience, we are not simply seeing red. The term "red" covers a wide range of visual experiences. Whenever we have an experience of color in real life it is an experience of that red in that context, under that light. Years ago when I was in art school it was a kind of motto to say "seeing is forgetting the name of the thing you see." So if you say "I see red," it was thought to be too generalizing. The goal was to recreate the particular red you were looking at -- or to create some kind of objective correlative for the experienced object in a different substance -- oil paint or watercolor.
The point is that when a person gets all the way to the point of being aware "I am seeing red," he has always already interpreted the input. It isn't simply a question of a wavelength of light starting a chain of dominoes that give rise to a particular type of qualia. The experience of the color also includes associations and methods of interpretation, like language, memories of other colors, etc.
There's a wonderful book on all this by Umberto Eco. You probably know, when he wasn't writing novels he was a specialist in semiotics, so this is a non-fiction book in which he discusses how the mind interprets, and the degree of influence from not-purely-sensory interpretive influences.
https://www.amazon.com/Kant-Platypus-Ess...501&sr=1-1
He understands that the hard problem is currently unsolvable, so he metaphorically refers throughout the book to what he calls the "black box," which is his half-serious name for the function that turns brain function into first person experience.
I guess what really interests me is the possibility of difference -- that people may look at the same world and perceive it very differently, at a very basic level. Someone who has spent decades painting pictures from nature is just going to have different experiences of color from someone who hasn't. The possibility of enriching our interpretations is appealing to me.
There's a wonderful scene in the Tale of Genji where all the courtiers blend up new and original types of incense, and then they have a contest with their most sensitive incense-maker acting as judge. Since smell is the human sense least susceptible to conceptualization, it always impressed me that this group of extreme aesthetes could be so aware. Translations of the book generally have to include long long footnotes explaining the different adjectives used in the original, which just aren't available in English, or even to most modern Japanese people.
Qualia, it seems to me, don't just appear automatically, but are contingent on experience and thus can be trained, enriched, etc. Connoisseurship or the aestheticism of someone like Dorian Gray or des Esseintes (though they are not admirable in other ways) always seemed enviable to me.
OK, sorry for the tangent. Again, I admire your input on this thread.
Well, if you're interested, this is a thread I started about six years ago when I was quite new to this site, the Seeing Red thread, where several of us discussed these sorts of issues in detail and from a lot of different perspectives. It still remains to me one of the most memorable, inspiring, and, let's say formative, discussions I've ever had on this site... but comes from a time when I had a lot more energy and drive for long discussions than I do now (ie IIRC it lasted about a month of solid posting with massive posts, something I just don't think I could do any more). Looking back at it in hindsight, I'd say it still generally represents my views on the subject, and could probably do much better justice to them than anything I could write in a few posts here in this thread, but at the same time, a lot of time has passed, so there will be differences.
